In instance-based learning, a training set is given to a classifier for classifying new instances. In practice, not all information in the training set is useful for classifiers. Therefore, it is convenient to discard irrelevant instances from the training set. This process is known as instance reduction, which is an important task for classifiers since through this process the time for classification or training could be reduced. Instance-based learning methods are often confronted with the difficulty of choosing the instances, which must be stored to be used during an actual test. Storing too many instances may result in large memory requirements and slow execution speed. In this paper, first, a Distance-based Decision Surface (DDS) is proposed and is used as a separate surface between the classes, and then an instance reduction method, which is based on the DDS is proposed, namely IRDDS (Instance Reduction based on Distance-based Decision Surface). Using the DDS with Genetic algorithm selects a reference set for classification. IRDDS selects the most representative instances, satisfying both of the following objectives: high accuracy and reduction rates. The performance of IRDDS is evaluated on real world data sets from UCI repository by the 10-fold cross-validation method. The results of the experiments are compared with some state-of-the-art methods, which show the superiority of the proposed method, in terms of both classification accuracy and reduction percentage.